...any physicist out there could explain?!? Need explanation about CURRENT, VOLTAGE, & FORCE caused by...?

Question

...any physicist here could explain?!? Need explanation about CURRENT, VOLTAGE, & FORCE caused by LIGHTNING here...

My boyfriend got strucked by a lightning once. He was outside reconstructing the famous Benjamin Franklin kite experiment when lightningbolt stroke him! I was so panicked that he vaporized in front of my very own eyes! Fortunately, he was just thrown away (O.M.G!) violently and hanging restlessly in huge tree nearby... weak and paralyzed! Glad that he survives and lives healthily today...

But I confused now... wouldn't people just die instantaneously if they got strucked by lightning? How did my boyfriend NOT die after getting STRUCKED... instead he's just thrown away violently by some such of magnificent FORCE?!? What kills some people actually when thet get strucked by lightning? What's the voltage-to-current tolerance for people to survive after getting electrocuted?

Well, please explain to me as plain and as simple as possible...
I'm just an ordinary girl without medical or scientific background :( ... please...?

Answer 1

Ok... I read the answers previously posted and they all sound reasonable close to the truth, so I'll leave them be.. they did fail to mention how a person is actually killed by a lightning strike... So I'll answer this for you...
Your body uses the flow of charged ions to control many processes (i.e. Muscle movement, nerve signalling). The flow of charge is more commonly known as electricity. The average membrane potential in a human is -70 kilojoules(kJ), and the channels in your cells membrane can be triggered by an impulse of only about 20 kJ. So when you get a current through your body with a potenial of thousands of volts... obviously there is going to be a disruption of the charge gradient. Depending on the path of the current through the body, the effects will vary... the most dangerous path is for the current to travel through your heart. Since your Heart is a muscle and is is controlled by an "electrical" signal, this extreme voltage can cause an over fibrulation of the cardiac muscles and essentially render then useless... kind of like if you were to take a slinky and stretch it out as fa as you can... its not goign to contract again, and is not something that can be easily fixed. Hope this helps!

Answer 2

Ok.. lightning is massive amounts of electrons moving through the air... this is also fantastically HOT. When the lightning strikes for the first time (it actually strikes many many many times in nearly the same spot) it is seeking the easiest path from the cloud to ground (or rarely from ground to cloud)... it super heats the air around it... makeing it expand rapidly.. maybe this is what threw your boyfriend away... if it actually struck him.. and not very close to him.. it probably followed the salts in his body to ground..

lightning has been known to blow people's shoes right off their feet.

now... after the first strike.. the air is ionized.. making an easier path... so some of the electrons.. go back up to the cloud.. because now there are too many on the ground in one spot..

the lightning goes back and forth.. like a wave in a dish of water.. until it finally levels out the amount of electrons in cloud and ground... or.. the difference drops to low enough voltage that it can no longer jump the gap between them.... much the same way you can shock someone by dragging your feet on a carpet and touching them... the spark does not jump until you get close enough.. and then the difference is not big enough to jump back to you.

Answer 3

lighning is hotter than the surface of the sun, and can contain up to 100 million volts of electricity. Some bolts are as wide as a half dollar! the negative ions in the clouds formed by bouncing about of ice and water droplets try to find positive charges in the sky or on the ground. so they send all their electrons out to a positive source, kind of like a battery. a negative and a positive end. in order for something to work, electricity must flow from the negative source to the positive source on the battery, so basically a thunderstorm is like a battery trying to make a circut, only about 10,000 times stronger!

I'm sorry but did you just use the word "strucked"?

and i'm just a 13 year old boy who likes science class and history channel and discovery channel :P

Answer 4

lightning happends when there is an accumulation of charges in the clouds. The voltage is really big (in your house outlet you have 110V bu in the lightning you have thousands of volts.)
When the lightning strocked you boyfriend he worked as a wire to transfer the electricity from the clouds to the earth. The earth dissipates all this electricity.

Answer 5

It's not VOLTAGE that kills you, it's CURRENT. Take, for example, carpet shock. It has a voltage of nearly 20,000 V. So, why don't we get killed? It has low CURRENT. Think of voltage as the amount of water in a river. Voltage is the amount of energy SUPPLIED. Now, think of current as the speed the water flows. Current is amount TRAVELLED in a certain period of time. So, suppose you are boating near the mouth of the riv. Does 1,000,000 gallons of water at 1 gal./hr. kill you? NO! The thing is CURRENT is the thing here.

Lightning has a very high voltage, yet a low current. That's why your boyfriend did'nt get killed.

Answer 6

The air born ash from the Iceland volcano contribute to the extreme cold by preventing some of the Winter Sun's Radiation from hitting the Earth's surface. The unusual movement of air may also be enhanced by differences in temperature between zones where the ash cause dimming and zones where it is not.